Yes, it's a lighter (very minimalist) version of lisp, as opposed to common lisp. Scheme seemed like more of a fun academic exercise. If I wanted to actually do more complex work I'd probably look to common lisp instead of Scheme.
Scheme does have a feature that would be handy in Common Lisp: continuations with indefinite extent. PG has an interesting way to simulate this with macros in On Lisp, but that hardly suffices. It is not something that I frequently need, but I have had one or two cases when such a continuation would have come in handy.
As someone who works under the title Software Engineer, I take it with a giant grain of salt until we're suddenly all taking the P.E. exam and getting our rings. Titles have the same problem all around the industry, people can call themselves whatever they want.
Man, contests like this seem like a bad idea for everyone involved. Solicit bids, take 2 million dollars and get a prototype/demonstration of capability from your top 4-8 options. Review the submitted work and communication each contractor provided, select the one that you feel the most comfortable with and just pay them to make the damn thing.
Thanks for a Joel article I hadn't read before. Two of my favorite class projects fell heavily into what he mentioned, implementing FAT12 in C for the OS course, and implementing a scheme interpreter in scheme for the programing language concepts course. Although call/cc still haunts my dreams.
